Article - GI Tunnel Rats

     

GI TUNNEL RATS EXPLORE VC CURVES
By Ann Bryan, Overseas Weekly

 

TRANG BANG, South Vietnam – The hole was small, just wide enough to allow Pvt William Hugmeyer, 18, to wiggle his tall wiry body into it.  His blond head disappeared down the hole.  Hugmeyer is a “tunnel rat,” one of the gutsy guys who volunteer to explore Viet Cong tunnels.  His only weapons were a flashlight, a .45 he carried in his fatigue pocket and a bayonet to dig past cave-ins and probe booby trtaps in the treacherous hideouts.  Hugmeyer and Capt. Daniel Deliz, slender, dark-haired S2 officer of the 14th Inf’s 2d Bn had just crawled into an underground VC network near Trang Bang, 20 miles northwest of Saigon.
   Unreeling from a big spool, a half-mile of commo wire permitted the 25th Inf Div men to relay their finds to the surface by field telephone.
   A small group of Charlie Co GIs sat around the tunnel entrance in a hedgerow surrounding an open field.  Razor-sharp punji stakes dotted the hedgerow.  There were also many shallow tunnels – GIs call them “spider holes” – just big enough for a VC to hide in.
   One man held the telephone, relaying the words of the tunnel rats to another soldier who carefully charted their underground route.
   “They’re at 25 feet, turning left checking for possible booby traps,” said the GI.
   As the rats continued, the trooper aboveground wrote down the degree of each turn, how long the tunnel ran before another twist.  “That thing has more curves than my wife,” he marveled.  “They’re at a place that’s loosely caved in,” reported the soldier on the phone.  “They’re digging to see if it goes further.”  It does.
   “Now they’re going over the top of a fallen-in room.”  Tunnel rats are respected but not necessarily envied by their buddies.  “Hey, Luke,” called one man during a break in the underground transmissions, “Why didn’t you go down?”  Another trooper laughed and said, “His father didn’t raise no dumb kids.”  “Are you calling Captain Deliz dumb?”  “Man, they could make you an assistant private for saying that.”  Commo wire unreeled rapidly into the hole as the rats followed the twisting tunnel.  “They just found a .30 caliber carbine round,” said the phone man, “A fairly fresh footprint in the dirt.  A sharp dogleg to the left.  Azimuth 235.”
   Lt Col John Schultz came to check on the tunnel exploration.  With the rats already past the 75-foot mark, the battalion honcho was pleased with his men’s find.  “I’ll be damned,” he said admiringly.  The GI on the phone listened to an underground call, grinned and said, “Negative,” into the receiver.  He listened again, grinned again.  “The Colonel says negative,” he told the rats.  “We don’t have any cold beer up here.”  “They say it’s pretty hot down there,” he explained.
   Schultz surmised that the lengthy tunnel his men found last week was an extension of one blown up earlier.
   Hugmeyer and Deliz came out of the hole for a breather and a smoke.  Both were covered with damp white earth.
   “I could just sit in a squatting position and do a duck walk,” said Deliz, describing the size of the tunnel.  “Those little people (the VC) could run right through.”
   The rats found several pairs of the rubber flip-flops (shower shoes) the VC and Vietnamese peasants wear, pieces of black pajamas and a dirty bowl.
   They had been unable to penetrate a false wall reinforced with bamboo poles.  “Let’s see if we can’t get behind it,” instructed Schultz, “just in case there’s an arms or ammunition cache down there somewhere.”
   Another tunnel rat, Pfc Kenneth Vandiver, 18, joined Hugmeyer and Deliz in the job of tearing through the wall.
   Why does a GI volunteer to be a tunnel rat?  “Somebody’s got to do it,” shrugged Vandiver, “and it’s usually cooler down there than it is up here.”
   After a thorough search that failed to turn up hidden good of VC, Charlie Co’s tunnel rats rigged explosives in the tunnel and blew it to kingdom come.  But the guerrillas keep on digging.


Contributed by James Huskey, HHC, 2/14th Inf.   Huskey served 4/66-67, so this article was written during that period.

Ann Bryan, a pioneering female combat correspondent, was sent to Saigon to start an Asian edition of Overseas Weekly, a scrappy German-based tabloid that took delight in uncovering the misdeeds of military brass, war profiteers, pot smoking among soldiers, and racial prejudice in the Army.
  

 

GI Tunnel Rats Explore VC Curves:  Article by Ann Bryan, Overseas Weekly
Copyright © 2009 Kirk S. Ramsey
Last modified: January 20, 2020